


Amber Shadows

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-26
Updated: 2007-10-26
Packaged: 2018-01-25 09:13:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1643354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Camilla looks back on her youth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Amber Shadows

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to curtana and dio for the beta reads - it's much better than it would have been, thanks to you. Any remaining mistakes are my own.
> 
> Written for lilacsigil

 

 

_All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand._ 1

Camilla reflected bitterly that for all her studies in Greek, it was Shakespeare that defined her life in the end.  Macbeth - that connection was obvious.  Though Oedipus and Iocasta fit reasonably well, too.

Of course, _she'd_ never been able to put herself in a suicidal frame of mind.  Not actively.  Her Nana's friends fluttered about behind cups of tea, oddly approving of the perfect picture she made: an innocent girl of good blood, exposed to tragedy early in life, and wasting away with fidelity to her lost love.  They had no idea of the blood on her hands; she could still smell it sometimes.

 _Thrice blooded, in fact,_ she thought, watching the amber liquor swirl in her glass.  _And though the last wasn't my fault, it struck the deepest._

She'd thought she'd been using Henry, for his strength, his money, his brilliance.  She hadn't expected to wake up one morning between rumpled, twisted sheets to a feeling of completeness with her nose against the whiskey-scented nape of his neck.  She would have left that very moment, if she had been able to see a way out.  Instead, she'd burrowed even deeper, hiding her eyes from the light.

_O light, may I ne'er look on thee again!_ 2

If only she could blot out all her mistakes as easily as Oedipus had put out his eyes. 

It had made perfect sense after Bunny's death to cling to Henry as Charles became more and more unhinged.  There was no way Julian would have been able to fend off her twin, when a single word or gesture alluding to the two murders would have sent their brilliant, cold professor running in a selfish bid for self-preservation.  She'd been borne out in that call when Julian had found Bunny's letter and was gone the next day.  Richard would have given his soul to try to protect her - and he would have failed miserably.  The passivity that marked him mouse-like and colorless would have made him topple instantly in the blast of Charles' alcohol-fueled rage.

 _At least he would have tried, though._   Unlike Francis.

She closed one eye and looked through her glass at a flat, amber-colored world, thinking dispassionately of the first time she'd seen Francis and Charles together.  It had been late at night during one of the frequent weekends out at the country house.  She remembered clearly how she'd been taking the stairs slowly, Chase & Phillips in hand and the end of her fountain pen in her mouth.  She'd caught a glimpse of movement in the sitting room and stopped dead still to see her brother's hand wrapped tightly in Francis' red hair, their kissing and caresses punctuated by chuckles and inarticulate gasps.  She'd left silently, unsure whether she should be feeling as jealous as she was, but she'd stayed long enough to see the drunken abandon on Charles' face, and the blissful hunger on Francis'.

Francis may have liked her, but he loved Charles.

No, Henry had been her only logical choice.  She'd felt like Psyche to his Eros; the way she'd felt fragile and precious at his side, in his arms, in the room at the Albemarle he'd reserved for her, the secrecy surrounding their relationship.  And while Charles was still ignorant of how closely she was entangled with Henry, life had been nearly perfect.

After Charles found out, in the most prosaic way possible - life became anything _but_ perfect.

When she'd first gone to Henry after that, the latest cigarette burn on her arm swathed in gauze, he'd seemed to swell as she calmly explained how Charles was acting, what he'd done to her.  How Charles couldn't handle the pressure of the police investigation into Bunny's disappearance.  How he was sure to crack eventually, and she couldn't be there when he did.  She'd let the Lucky Strike he'd given her tremble as she brought it to her lips.  It had been calculated and cold, and it had worked.

She'd known what Henry would think of Charles' imminent betrayal, but at that point she'd been too worried about her own safety to think of her brother's.   Her twin had always seemed like a part of her own self, but it was a part of her self that she'd decided she didn't want anymore, couldn't have anymore.

Especially if keeping that part meant she couldn't have Henry.

Camilla closed her eyes and brought her glass to her lips, draining her drink in one swallow.  Hardly ladylike, but then straight whiskey was hardly a lady's drink.  She stood carefully and took measured steps to the crystal decanter on Nana's walnut sideboard.  The neck of the bottle chattered only a little against her glass.  She replaced the stopper with a wisp of a chime and took her newly-full drink back to curl up again on the rock-hard divan.

By comparison, the first two deaths were mere low spots in the road, meriting little more than a shrug.  Bunny's foolish, drunken, hateful face moving through confusion to terror as he went over the cliff still featured regularly in her dreams, but it was more of a curiosity than a nightmare.  And she had only one memory of the poor farmer whose blood had soaked her hair after the bacchanal.  The scent of his entrails should have been horrifying, traumatic - but it hadn't been so at the time, nor was it now.

She vividly remembered the forest rushing past her as she ran, patches of moonlight punctuating the woods.  She remembered toppling as the boys caught her, her legs (were there four, or only two?) kicking the air vainly.  She remembered Charles' panting breath, Francis' soft hands, Henry's teeth at her neck.  Francis' growls as he kissed her, Charles howling as he took Francis from behind.  Henry hot and strong at own back, his large hands gripping her hips as he muttered in rough Greek into her ear.

Finding her glass paused halfway from lap to mouth, she smiled tiredly at the hold that memory still had on her and took a sip of forgetfulness.  Του υδωρ Ληθη3, she thought involuntarily.

Charles had gone as far from her as he could without following Henry down Anchurus'4; road to let the earth close over him.  Francis was fast drinking himself to death to escape the pastel clutches of his wife.  And Richard had returned to California to teach English in a technicolor town so far removed from her sepia-toned world she could barely comprehend it.

 _"I loved him, too,"_ she remembered him saying.  As if that could ever be enough.

She took another sip and tilted her head back to watch shadows move on the ceiling through golden afternoon light, cradling the glass as though it were a dead, much-beloved child.

 __1 Lady Macbeth,  Macbeth, William Shakespeare

2 Oedipus, Oedipus Tyranneus, Sophocles

3 Greek, translates as "Water of Lethe"

4 Anchurus was the son of Midas, who rode his horse into a crack in the earth and let it close over him.

 

 

 


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